


Weirwood Heart

by PrioritiesSorted



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Romance, baby!Sansa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-28
Updated: 2013-07-28
Packaged: 2017-12-21 16:06:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/902213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrioritiesSorted/pseuds/PrioritiesSorted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It was years, really, before she loved him."</p>
<p>A little drabble about how Catelyn Tully came to love her Northern husband.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Weirwood Heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [congratsyouvegrownasoul](https://archiveofourown.org/users/congratsyouvegrownasoul/gifts).



> A birthday gift for Julia, because I know how she loves her Starks.

It was years, really, before she loved him. She was a proud woman, she would not deny it, and to see her new husband return from war with a dark haired babe in his arms cut her deeper than she cared to admit. The bastard looked more like his father than her own trueborn son ever would, even as a babe in arms; it bothered her, and though she tried desperately to hide it, she knew that he saw. Something in his quiet, guarded eyes told her that this distant husband of hers saw far more than anyone realised. Could he see that, despite her best efforts, she did not love him? Yes, that she knew. Could he see how hard she tried? She hoped with all her heart that he could.

Later, she will tell her children that their love grew slowly, so much so that she barely noticed its presence until it filled her up and tugged the edges of her mouth into a smile when she saw him approach. This is true, to an extent, but there was a moment (a moment that she keeps hidden in the most private corners of her heart because even now there are some things that are only hers), that she remembers as vividly as though she were three and twenty once more, lying exhausted in the birthing bed.

_He held a tiny bundle in his strong arms, looking down at the child as though she was a gift from The Mother herself, and perhaps it was true._

_“She will be a beauty, like her mother.” He said, with such certainty that she could not bring herself to question him._

_“And what will you name your beauty, my lord?” She had asked instead, expecting an immediate answer,_ Lyanna _, but perhaps she ought to have learnt by now that her husband always surprises her._

_“She is your beauty as much as mine, perhaps more so. It will be you who teaches her how to be a lady, and you she will entrust her girlhood secrets to, you she will look up to and admire. So what would you name her, my lady?”_

_“I… I… Sansa” She stuttered, “I would name her Sansa.”_

That was the start of it, the moment he planted a seed in her heart that grew beyond the respect and soft affection she had cultivated alone. She had always been told that love was red, that it bloomed bright and strong and vibrant against the stark wilderness of the world. But this seed was nothing so frivolous; this seed was grey as the stones that had built the fortress that was her home now, the shoots that began to grow from it as white as the first snows of summer, pure and light and promising life.

Even then, she had never imagined how strong and fast that seed would grow, spreading through her until her veins were a weirwood, full of the North, full of him. She never imagined that while she would worship in the sept and think of her childhood home, her roots would spread amongst the heart-trees and reach for him. She never imagined that her favourite parts of herself would come to be the parts he loved, that she would clasp him to her with a desperate strength that final time, that in the midst of the noise and the smoke and the blood her last thoughts would be of him.

Yet that was how it came to be, for she was a weirwood, and he had made a home in her.  

 


End file.
